The first time I tried this, I plugged my CAT5 cord into my Ethernet port, opened a browser, and the internet was there. Since my linux machine is not my primary machine, I uplugged the CAT5 cord to go back into my main machine, winxp. Now, I needed to download something for my linux machine so I unplugged the cord from my winxp and into my linux box and now it doesn't seem to have the internet there like last time. Anyone spot what is wrong?

Lots of things can go wrong. What are the lights on the ethernet card doing, or not doing when it fails.

If the lights are normal, log in to su, and run ifconfig. Here is an example of the output.

ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 000:B7:26:B3:78
inet addr:192.168.1.13 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1663 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1700 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:1193585 (1.1 Mb) TX bytes:216998 (211.9 Kb)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0xc000

Look for your ip address. Try using ping command to see if you can reach any otehr machine on your network.

Post your results back.

Hmm, its telling me 'ifconfig - command not found' - im on Fedora Core 1, btw.

Thanks

ah well, seems as if I had to probe for the correct mac address. works fine, thanks